The newspapers are reporting that the UK government is worried because an online petition on the 10 Downing Street website has more than a million signatures protesting about transport policy.
Which reminded me that there's a petition on that site set up by Ian Fenn after the fiasco of the ...

I was in Redmond on Friday to meet with a few folks on the Internet Explorer team to discuss improvements we (as in the WaSP DOM Scripting and Microsoft task forces, and the JS Ninjas) wanted to see in IE.next.

A passion and hope I had during my years as Group Lead for the Web Standards Project was to reach out and create a network with peers around the globe. After all, this is the World Wide Web, right? It made sense to me that in order to advance our ...

Douglas Crockford, discoverer of JSON and JavaScript evangelist/veteran has given a training on the theory of the DOM lately and the videos are available on the web.
The course takes you through the theory of the DOM, how browsers implement it and what the problems with the DOM and the ...

Hailing from Sweden, Lars Gunther, (relatively unknown to the Web guru world), takes on a sizable challenge and project to educate and advocate Web standards and curriculum change in his country’s educational system.

It is not new, but it still is rather clever: In order to avoid having to add event handlers to each and every element you want to monitor, you can use one single handler on a parent element and let browser event bubbling do the rest of the work for ...

Designing for the web is challenging enough, but when you need to take into account scaling font-sizes, it can quickly become a nightmare. The common wisdom is to design your pages to accomodate fonts two sizes up and two sizes down from the default, but with this new script from two clever Yahoo! blokes, your can get way more clever.

Many developers in the education field are moving to open source content management software solutions for a variety of reasons, including: better standards/accessibility support, and a growing community and network of resources and help. The National Center on Disability & Access to Education recently hosted a webcast case study of one such solution, Plone.

As a student of Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Dallas, Texas, Blake Elshire learned CSS as part of his course, then discovered that not all students were quite as charmed by the technology as he was. He shares his thoughts and insights with WaSP EduTF.

WaSP issues an open invitation to work with Assistive Technology vendors to help ensure greater support for standards-based web development techniques in software that enables access for millions of people worldwide.

Those who remember the (now defunct) seminal Glasshaus book Accessible Web Sites may be interested to know that friends of ED have just released a completely reworked and expanded successor: Web Accessibility - Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance.After an overview of the accessibility law and guidelines, and a discussion about ...

There’s been a bit of confusion over the Acid2 test and Opera 9 results. Ian Hickson has provided WaSP with the following clarifications about the Acid2 test and how things should behave. Hopefully, this insight will serve to clarify why some people are reporting issues in Opera 9 compliance.

Recent Buzz

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.

When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.

In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:

A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.

HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.

WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.

Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.

Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.

Nota bene: In the near future, we will be making a permanent, static archive of webstandards.org and some of our other resources like WaSP Interact to preserve them as a resource and to provide a record of our 15-year mission to improve the web.Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth contributed to this post.